BSC-CNS Newsletter September 2021

BSC has created a model trained on the MareNostrum supercomputer with data files from the Biblioteca Nacional de España. MarIA, the name of the system, is a set of language models or, in other words, deep neural networks that have been trained to acquire an understanding of language, its vocabulary and its mechanisms to express meaning and write at an expert level.

BSC, together with Intel, have succeeded in encrypting the execution of big neural networks in an efficient way, thanks to Intel Optane persistent memory and Intel Xeon Scalable processors with built-in AI acceleration. Until now, the size of the main memory supported by current technology had limited the use of homomorphic encryption to small neural network models, designed for mobile devices.

ADMIRE will create an active input/output (I/O) software stack that dynamically adjusts computation and storage requirements through intelligent global coordination, malleability of computation and I/O, and the scheduling of storage resources along all levels of the storage hierarchy.

After more than two years of research, the collaborative project between Europe and Mexico ENERXICO, coordinated by BSC, comes to an end with major results and contributions in the context of Exascale HPC and data intensive algorithms for different energy sectors.

The AXA Research Fund has recognized Markus Donat, the Climate prediction group co-leader at BSC, with the AXA Award for Climate Science, that aims to reward researchers for their outstanding contribution to scientific understanding of and adaptation to climate change. Donat is a climate scientist whose focuses on understanding climate extremes in the context of climate variability and climate change.

Rosa M. Badia, the Workflows and distributed computing group manager and coordinator of the eFlows4HPC project, has been elected as Association for Computing Machine (ACM) Europe Councilor. Badia says she aims to “expand the presence of Europe (and Spain) within ACM and promote European candidates in ACM bodies and degrees. I would also like to contribute to increasing the visibility of women in the area of information technology, trying to improve their representation”.